In recent years, there has been a surge of development and releases of new types of mobile devices made available to the public. Today's consumer is often equipped with a smart phone, tablet, MP3 player or other device that can be used to access the internet, download and view digital media (e.g. video and audio files), and perform a wide variety of other functions. Given such large numbers of devices and device types, it is quickly becoming a non-trivial task to make media content available to all of the consumers across their various devices. In fact, many companies are spending large fractions of their time and resources managing, scaling and maintaining media processing systems that may have nothing to do with their core business. These companies are looking for encoding systems and services that can provide the best video/audio quality to consumers at a low cost. Because digital video (and audio) content is often delivered to multiple device types over unmanaged networks with fluctuating bandwidth, it is desirable to utilize transcoding to produce a version of each asset to accommodate these variants.
In this context, many companies need to perform a wide variety of functions on media content. Besides encoding or transcoding, throughout the lifecycle of a media asset, a variety of other aspects of content may need to be changed, added or manipulated, such as advertisement, personalization or security information. Moreover, a plurality of otherwise unrelated business entities may be involved in the handling of the media asset throughout its lifecycle. All of these independent processes need to be managed and controlled, allowing businesses and enterprises to provide an optimal media delivery infrastructure for media consumers.